Zeitoun (18 page)

The wind was picking up, blowing away from Zeitoun’s office. If there had been any gust in the other direction, his building would have succumbed, too. He thanked God for this small mercy.

As they watched, they glimpsed a few other watchers, faces orange and silent. Other than the crackle of the fire and the occasional collapsing wall or floor, the night was quiet. There were no sirens, no authorities of any kind. Just a block of homes burning and sinking into the obsidian sea that had swallowed the city.

Coming back to the house on Dart, Zeitoun and Todd were quiet. The stars were out. Todd steered the boat like he was captaining a great yacht. He dropped Zeitoun at his house, and they said good night. Back on the roof, Nasser was already asleep in the tent.

Zeitoun stood there, watching the fire ebb and flow. The flood, and now the fire: it was difficult not to think of passages in the Qur’an that recounted the flood of Noah, the evidence of God’s wrath. And yet despite the devastation visited upon New Orleans, there was still a kind of order to the night. Zeitoun was safe on his roof, the city was silent and still, the stars were in their place.

He had been on a tanker once, maybe twenty years earlier, navigating through the Philippines. It was late, after midnight, and Zeitoun was keeping the captain company on the bridge.

To stay awake and alert, the captain, a Greek man of middle age, liked to take up provocative subjects. He knew that Zeitoun was a Muslim and a thoughtful man, so he sparked a debate about the existence of God. The captain began by expressing his utter conviction that there was no God, no deity in the sky watching over the human world.

Zeitoun had been on the bridge with the captain for an hour at that point, watching him pilot the ship through the many islands, avoiding high shelves and sandbars, other ships and countless unseen dangers. The Philippines, with over seven thousand islands but only five hundred lighthouses, was known for its frequency of maritime accidents.

“What would happen,” Zeitoun asked the captain, “if you and I went below the deck, and just went to our bedrooms and went to sleep?”

The captain gave him a quizzical look and answered that the ship would most certainly hit something—would run aground or into a reef. In any event, disaster.

“So without a captain, the ship cannot navigate.”

“Yes,” the captain said, “What’s your point?”

Zeitoun smiled. “Look above you, at the stars and moon. How do the stars keep their place in the sky, how does the moon rotate around the
earth, the earth around the sun? Who’s navigating?”

The captain smiled at Zeitoun. He’d been led into a trap.

“Without someone guiding us,” Zeitoun finished, “wouldn’t the stars and moon fall to earth, wouldn’t the oceans overrun the land? Any vessel, any carrier of humans, needs a captain, yes?”

The captain was taken with the beauty of the metaphor, and let his silence imply surrender.

On his roof, Zeitoun crawled into his tent, trying not to wake Nasser. He turned his back to the fire and slept fitfully, thinking of fires and floods and the power of God.

In the morning Zeitoun rose early, climbed down to his canoe, and paddled across the street to feed the dogs. He climbed up the tree, crawled through the windows, and fed them all the last of the meat.

“Like barbecue?” he asked.

They did.

“See you tomorrow,” he said, making a mental note to get some dog food from Todd.

He picked up Nasser, dropped him at the house on Claiborne, and went on alone. He wasn’t sure where he would go today, so he chose a new route, this time going back to Dart, then east on Earhart, heading to Jefferson Davis Parkway.

This day was quieter than the few before it. There were no helicopters, no military boats. He was seeing far fewer people wading through the water, now green-grey and streaked everywhere with oil.
It smelled dirtier every day, a wretched mélange of fish and mud and chemicals.

As he approached the junction of Earhart, Jefferson Davis, and Washington, the land rose up a bit, and he could see dry grass, a wide intersection with a large green and brown patch in the middle. And on the grass there was an astonishing sight, especially given what he and his guests had been talking about the night before. There were three horses, chewing happily. They were free, with no riders or saddles. The scene was at once idyllic and hallucinatory. He paddled closer. One of the horses lifted its head, noticing Zeitoun. It was a beautiful animal, white and perfectly groomed. Seeing Zeitoun as no threat, the horse returned to its meal. The other two, one black and one grey, continued to eat. How they had gotten there was beyond Zeitoun’s imagination, but they seemed ethereally content, luxuriating in their freedom.

Zeitoun watched them for a few minutes, then traveled on.

Zeitoun paddled down Jefferson Davis. He carried his canoe across the bridge over I-10 and continued on, reaching the residential stretch of the road. Near the corner of Banks Street, he heard a female voice.

“Hey there.”

He looked up to see a woman on the second-floor balcony of a home. He slowed down and paddled toward her.

“Give me a ride?” she asked.

The woman wore a shimmering blue blouse. Zeitoun told her he would be happy to help, and he steered the canoe to her steps. As she descended from the balcony, Zeitoun noticed her short skirt and high heels, her heavily made-up face, her small glittering purse. And finally he realized what might have been obvious to many: she was a prostitute. He
didn’t know what he thought about paddling around in his canoe with a prostitute aboard, but he didn’t have time to turn her away now.

She was about to step into the canoe when Zeitoun stopped her.

“Can you take off the shoes?” he asked.

He was afraid the high heels might puncture the boat’s thin aluminum. She complied. She was going to Canal, she said. Could he drop her off there? Zeitoun said he would.

She sat in front of him, her hands on either side of the canoe. Feeling like a gondolier, Zeitoun paddled steadily and said nothing. He wondered if there was, only a few days after the hurricane, already a market for her services. Could she have been working in the home where he picked her up?

“Where you going?” he asked, unable to quell his curiosity.

“To work,” she said.

At the corner of Jefferson Davis and Canal, she pointed to the First United Methodist Church.

“Drop me here,” she said.

He paddled to the pink brick building, where the water met the church’s higher steps, and she lifted herself out.

“Thank you, honey,” she said.

He nodded and paddled on.

Zeitoun came to the I-10/Claiborne overpass again, and even from a distance he could see that the people who he had seen awaiting rescue there a few days ago had been taken away. The cars remained, as did piles of garbage and human waste. As he floated closer, something caught his attention: a patch of fur. In a moment he was close enough to see that it was a dog, lying on its side. He remembered that when he was last here, there had been a half-dozen small dogs, most of them
puppies, taking shelter in the shade of the cars. As his canoe tapped against the overpass, he could see that there were ten or more animals, the same ones he’d seen before and a few others, in various positions on the road. He anchored his canoe to the overpass and climbed up onto the pavement. He gagged at the sight. They were dead. The dogs had been killed, each of them shot in the head. Some had been shot repeatedly—head, torso, legs.

He paddled quickly back to the house on Claiborne, shaken. He called Kathy. He wanted to hear her voice.

“I saw the most terrible thing,” he said. He told her about the dogs. He couldn’t understand it.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“I don’t know who would do this.”

“I don’t know either, honey.”

“Why kill them all?”

They tried to make sense of it. Even if they were euthanizing the animals, it didn’t add up. There were so many boats in the city. It would only take a moment to take them aboard and set them loose anywhere. But perhaps something had changed irrevocably. That this was considered a sane or even humane option signaled that all reason had left this place.

“How’re the kids?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. “They miss you.”

“Tomorrow you’ll put the kids in school?” he asked.

“I’ll try,” she said.

He tried to understand, but he was frustrated. The kids needed to be in school. But he was in no mood to argue.

They talked about what he planned to do that afternoon. There was
both more and less to see each day. There were fewer people left in the city, even downtown, and yet the horses, the prostitute, the dogs—it was growing ever more apocalyptic and surreal. He thought maybe he would relax this day. Think about it all.

“You should,” she said. Any time he stayed home she felt more sure of his safety. “Stay at home today.”

He decided he would.

He tried to, at least. He lay there on Nademah’s bed, trying to relax. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the dogs. Who could shoot a dog? All those animals, needing, trusting. He tried, as always, to give the benefit of the doubt to whoever had done it. But if they could find their way to the dogs with guns and bullets, wouldn’t it be just as easy to feed them?

He got out of bed and looked for his Qur’an. There was a passage he’d been thinking about,
al-Haqqah
, “The Reality.” He took the book from Nademah’s shelf and found the page. It was as he remembered it.

Zeitoun crawled through the window and onto the roof. The sky was muddy, the wind cool. He sat down and watched the city in the distance.

He was struck by the possibility that those who had killed the dogs might not have been law-enforcement officers at all. Perhaps Kathy was right, and armed gangs were free in the city, shooting whatever they chose to.

He pondered his own possibilities for self-defense. What would he do if men came here, to him? He had seen no robberies in his neighborhood thus far. But what if they came here?

As the night darkened, Zeitoun wished he was not alone. He
thought of returning to the other house, to talk to Todd and Nasser about what he’d seen.

But instead, he sat on his roof, pushing away thoughts of the dogs on the overpass. Perhaps he was weak in this way. He had always been soft when it came to animals. As a child, he had kept many. He’d caught lizards and crabs. He’d even kept a stray donkey in the back alley for a few days, wanting it to be his, to take care of it. His father scolded him for that, and for the pigeon-grooming operation he’d run with his brother Ahmad. It was Ahmad’s idea, really—another scheme into which he had enticed his little brother.

“Want to see something?” Ahmad had said one day. Ahmad was sixteen, and Abdulrahman would follow him anywhere.

After swearing Abdulrahman to secrecy, Ahmad brought him up to the roof and showed him a cage he had built from scrap wood and chicken wire. Inside was a nest of straw and newsprint, and inside the nest was a bird—something, Abdulrahman thought, between a pigeon and a dove. Ahmad planned to keep dozens like this one on the roof, to feed and care for them, to try to train them to deliver messages. Ahmad asked if Abdulrahman wanted to help. Abdulrahman did indeed, and they agreed to care for the birds together. Abdulrahman, being younger, would clean the cages when necessary, and Ahmad, being older and more experienced in these matters, would find new birds, feed those who lived there, and train them when the time came.

And so they spent hours there, watching the birds come and go, feeding them from their palms, exulting in the familiarity that allowed the birds to land on their arms and shoulders.

Soon there were thirty or more birds living on their roof. Ahmad and Abdulrahman built more homes for them, until they had assembled
a complex that looked not unlike the stone and adobe structures in their neighborhood, homes stacked upon each other, rising up from the ocean, interlocking like a crude mosaic, extending inland.

All was good until their father Mahmoud discovered their hobby. He considered the keeping of birds a terrible and unsanitary waste of time. Since Mohammed’s death, Mahmoud had been impatient, irritable, and so the kids had tried to find diversions outside their grieving home. This hobby, Mahmoud insisted, was taking them away from their schoolwork, and if they forsook their education for pigeons, he would be stuck with not only the birds but two illiterate sons.

He demanded that they free the birds and dismantle the cages. The boys were despondent, and argued their case to their mother. She deferred to her husband, and he was unbending. Abdulrahman and Ahmad refused to do it themselves, so one day, as the boys were leaving for school, Mahmoud said he would do it himself while they were gone.

The boys returned that afternoon and ran straight to the roof to see what had been done. They found the birds still there, their homes untouched. Amazed, they ran down to the kitchen, where they found their mother beaming. Apparently when Mahmoud had gone up to the roof, the birds had flocked to him, alighting on his shoulders and arms, and he was so charmed that he couldn’t send them away. He allowed the birds to stay.